Random Facts About Life

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Random Facts About Life and Other Interesting Things!

If I don’t write things down, I forget them. Seriously. If I have a store list of more than three items, I ask someone at home to text it to me. My wife has threatened to pin notes to me in the past. There is an exception to this however. I remember useless bits of trivia. I’ve loved collecting little bits of knowledge since I was a kid. When Trivial Pursuit exploded onto the scene back in the 80’s, I was in my glory. Anyway, I guess there are some other people out there who like this silly stuff too, so I thought I’d make a big, ever-growing list. Please add your own fun facts for the day in the comments section.

An ostrich isn’t very bright. Its brain is smaller than one of its eyeballs. Of course one eyeball is about the size of a billiard ball! Ostriches are also the fastest animals on two legs with an ability to run about 45 mph.

The United States has 716 people incarcerated for every 100,000 citizens. The number in Russia is 484 per 100,000.

Based on evidence found in Egyptian tombs, some people believe that people have been using dice since around 2000 b.c.

What do you have growing in your fridge? Don’t forget to celebrate Clean Out Your Refrigerator Day on November 15th. The fridge is no place to store your science experiments!

How are your keyboarding skills? Typists use the seemingly senseless sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” as a drill because is uses all of the letters in the alphabet. Such a sentence is called a pangram. If you like some variety, try this one… Both fickle dwarves jinx my pig quiz.

Like a challenge? Try writing a rhyming poem using the words orange, purple, silver, and month. None of those words have a rhyming match in the English language.

When most people think of Halloween, they think of pumpkins and Jack O’ Lanterns, but the first Jack O’Lanterns were actually made from Turnips. Vintage Halloween decorations and memorabilia are now very collectible.

Once it goes into circulation, a dollar bill only has a lifespan of about 18 months.

There is a Twinkie sealed in the Millennium Time Capsule. It was put there by those wacky Clintons back in 1999. Do you think it will look the same when they open the capsule in the year 2100?

A dolphin can leap 20 feet out of the water. The deepest recorded dive for a dolphin was just under 1000 feet (990 feet).

John Wayne played Ghengis Khan in a 1956 movie called The Conqueror.

Did you ever notice the name of the sorcerer in the Disney movie Fantasia? It is Yen Sid. Read that backwards.

People love collecting Disney memorabilia. They’ve been swapping Disney pins for their lanyards since 1999 and it is estimated that collectors and cast members have swapped about 350,000,000 of them.

Babe Ruth made $80,000 a year for playing baseball and it was a pretty big deal (in1930). This year, Zack Greinke, a pitcher for the Dodgers, will make about $28,000,000. Not bad considering he came in 8th in voting for the 2013 Cy Young award.

Humans started slapping brands on animals about 7,000 years ago.

Ten people die every minute from tobacco related diseases. In 2011, almost 43% of smokers had made a quit attempt during the previous year.

You won’t want to wear any emo clothing if you visit Russia. It is illegal to do so in government buildings and public schools.

Travel much? Fifty percent of Americans grow up and go on living within fifty miles of the place they were born.

Post-it notes became available to Americans on April 6, 2000.

Pac-Man hit the United States in October of 1980. It had been out in Japan since May 22. When Google put a free version of it on their homepage to celebrate 30 years in 2010, people around the world spent 4.8 million hours playing it.

The first North American airline to ban smoking was Air Canada.

Lake Michigan is the only one of the Great Lakes that doesn’t venture into Canadian territory.

Casino owners in Las Vegas would love for you to lose track of time. They don’t hang up any clocks.

Random Harry Potter fact… The drivers of the Knight Bus, Stanley and Ernie, were named after the grandfathers of author JK Rowling.

Blonde women have higher estrogen levels than brunettes.

Warm weather stimulates hair growth.

The duck-billed platypus has a poison spur that it can use for self defense.

Before they formed the group KISS, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were in a band called Wicked Lester

Remember “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie? Stevie Ray Vaughn played guitar on that song.

The Supreme Court of the United States has its own police force.

George Washington owned 36 foxhounds.

The biggest cats living in the wild today are Siberian tigers. At over 12 feet in length, they can top 700 pounds.

What do you call rabbits when they get together in a large group? A herd. A male is a buck. The female is a doe. Babies are called kits.

The more people there are at the scene of something like an accident, the less likely it is that someone will step forward to lend a helping hand. This is known as the bystander effect.

The 10 most common surnames in the United States (as of 2000) are Smith, Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller, Davis, Garcia, Rodriguez, and Wilson (in descending order).

Francis A. Johnson rolled up 17,400 pounds of baler twine into a ball 12 feet in diameter. The project started in 1950 and ended 29 years later. The giant ball “lives” in Darwin, Minnesota.

Redheads are more sensitive to pain than people with other hair colors.

Men spend about twice as much as women on Valentine’s Day.

St. Patrick was English, not Irish.

The lifespan of a kangaroo is about 6 years in the wild.

Four of the five people in Stephen King’s immediate family are writers.

Are you sarcastic? Look up its ancient Greek roots and you’ll see that it mean “to tear the flesh”.

All of the hens in the United States lay enough eggs to circle the planet at the equator one hundred times.

Over a lifetime, the average person will spend about 90,000 hours at work.

One fourth of people use the phone to email to check in at work on their days off.

Potassium-40 is a radioactive isotope of potassium. It’s found in bananas. In Uganda, the average person eats 500 pounds of bananas every year.

Breaking wind can help reduce blood pressure.

The longest bridge in the world is located in China. It is the Danyang–Kunshan Grand Bridge. Its length is 164,800 m (540,700 ft).

Unlike the Earth, the Moon has no magnetic field of its own.

Did you ever notice that a strawberry is covered in seeds? It is the only fruit with its seeds on the outside.

Got spiders? The only continent where spiders aren’t found is Antarctica.

Spiders always keep four legs in contact with the ground when they are running away from you (or walking in general).

The United States is home to about 150,000 professional librarians.

Omphalophobia is the fear of belly buttons.

Mosquitos can find you by following the trail of carbon dioxide you leave when you breathe.

What substance can be found as a liquid, a solid, and a gas at normal Earth temperatures? Water.

The North Star (Polaris) is about 323 light years away from us. That means that the light you see when you look at it started its trip toward Earth back around 1691 or so.

It would take about 100,000 years to cross our Milky Way galaxy if you could move at the speed of light.

What’s the longest major league home run ever hit? Mickey Mantle gets the nod at 634 feet in September of 1960. Here are a few other moon shots you might enjoy. (They get longer as you watch the video.)

Service dogs are trained to know when they are on duty and when they are off duty.

The last movie released on laserdisc was End of Days.

As of 2013, there were 328 million domains registered.

Coca Cola can be used for more than just quenching thirst. It cleans windows, provides relief for stings, and can help eliminate the smell if you come across a grumpy skunk.

The raw material that eventually inspired petroleum jellies like Vaseline was originally found on oil wells back in 1859. People now use it for a variety of purposes including anti-aging products.

At one time, Wall Street was actually behind a 12 foot stockade to keep settlers safe. I guess investors have other things to worry about today.

There are about 583,500 electrician jobs in the United States. The job outlook is twenty percent through 2022 and that rates as faster than average. Their median pay rate is $49,840 per year .

Have you ever tried to swallow while you are breathing? You can’t do it.

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has more bridges than any other city in the world (446 of them)

There are about 20,400,000 people in the United States who practice yoga. Most of them are women (82 percent).

Mid-size and small businesses usually do between 20 and 40 percent of their business during November and December (the big Christmas shopping months). Here’s an idea to help build up your Christmas stash!

People in the United States spend about twenty billion dollars on mattresses each and every year.

What actress has received the most Oscar nominations for her acting? Meryl Streep gets the nod with 18 nominations. She has won three times.

90% of American homes contain a Bible.

A housefly only lives between fifteen and thirty days.

About 6 percent of truck drivers are female.

A horse cannot throw up.

Scientists actually call that collection of pointy things on the end of a stegosaurus tail a “Thagomizer” based on a Far Side cartoon drawn by Gary Larson back in 1982. Thag got “Thagomized” by the spikes. Read more.

An average of twenty-two people are killed by cows every year.

The huckleberry is the official state fruit of Idaho.

There are 267 people born into the world every minute.

108 people die every minute.

You could not buy a Diet Coke prior to 1982.

Male mosquitos don’t bite people.

If you crunch into a Wint-O-Green Lifesaver in a dark room, you can see a faint flash of light (in a mirror). That sparking is caused by a process called triboluminescence.

Reno, Nevada lies farther west than Los Angeles, California.

You can type “Alaska” using only one row of keys on your keyboard. You can’t do that with any other state name.

If you own a pet guinea pig, you need to provide it with foods that contain vitamin C. They need it to stay healthy.

Ernest Hemingway was a war correspondent during World War 2.

Tom Brady was drafted as a catcher by the Montreal Expos out of high school.

Forbes’ ranked Will Ferrell as the number 1 most overpaid Hollywood star in 2009.

Racer Jeff Gordon’s wife was Miss Winston back in 1993.

Kobe Bryant actually played 51 minutes in one game during the 2001-2002 season. The game went into overtime.

The frilled shark can swallow its prey whole. It is seldom seen and is often called a “living fossil”.

Wilson gets ten NFL footballs out of a single cowhide.

NFL rules require that footballs are inflated to 12.5 – 13.5 pounds.

NBA basketballs must be inflated to between 7.5 and 8.5 pounds per square inch.

Nynuk was the original name of the boy band New Kids on the Block. The group got its start in 1984.

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